Dear Editor,
As I congratulate your Sunday leader-writer on yesterday’s wise and necessary editorial, I have to add a meditation on the issue, personal and sentimental, maybe, but from our shared patriotism.
Sometimes the different strands of our duty pull us in conflicting directions. Sensitive persons can feel torn between duty to our close associates, duty to the wider community, duty to the nation. At bottom it is only by fulfilling our duty to integrity, our sense of right and wrong, that can allow us the inner peace from which we can function at our best potential. Of course, it is to spouse and children that we return each evening, to renew our stability and energy to continue the daily work we feel called to. And so it is the duty to family that is paramount in each human breast; this is surely basic to evolution.
The most significant remark I ever heard from Ralph Ramkarran was his response to my enquiry how he could stick to the PPP after so many apparent failures, following the death of Cheddi Jagan, to live up to the idealistic hopes I knew we shared for Guyana’s future. He said, “Gordon, it’s my family. I can’t give up the party.” It was enough answer for me, for whom the Ramkarrans had been part of my own family associations for 4 generations.
I knew from my father, who had worked with him, that Boysie Ramkarran, as a theoretical Marxist, was an honest man dedicated to service of the people whose history he sprang from. As a small boy I had known Boysie’s parents, kind, warm human beings who produced in Boysie a decent, passionate patriot, whom I admired when I knew him late in his life. He in turn produced in Ralph, who could not escape his heritage, even as he developed his professional career, in which I knew him as his firm’s client as well as a family friend. And Ralph and Janet have since produced two sons, young men that I and Guyana can have great hopes of in the future.
Different depths of family loyalty, conflicting calls on the sense of duty. To all that has been said on Ralph’s painful break with the PPP, I can only add my confidence that he is following his most basic conscience, and the outcome will be the best that is possible for all the levels of his family sensibility.
Yours faithfully
Gordon Forte
